Plex broken after upate

Plex Media Server
1

Server Version#: 1.26.2.5797
Hello,

I just installed the last version because that was recommended to fix a problem. The problem was I had no longer access to any content after a computer restart

After installing the new version, I no longer had my library. I tried various experiments, I suddenly had access to my library, although I was asked to do something related to my account. I do not remember what it was, but something that enabling the library by declaring it. It worked for one day, but after restarting the computer, i stopped working again.

I suspect my previous installation was through SNAP. The server is now running, but with an empty library. I can see the name of the old library, but when I try to access, it says the server is not running.

I suspect that I have two installations, the old one and the new one. I don’t know how to check for this.

In the web app, I can see two servers: The old one and the new one. The old one says: “xxx is currently unavailable”. The new one says " This page is empty. Expecting more? Visit the Manage Libraries page to add folders and scan library files."

The problem is that I don’t want to create a new library, but to use my old one, because it contains tons of data I created (descriptions, images and more) as well as the history (which of the tens of thousands videos have already been watched). How can I reuse my old library?

2

  1. snap list will show you if PMS is still installed.

  2. Looking in /var/snap, you will find plexmediaserver if it was there and not purged.

  3. You can make a tar ball of that and literally drop it on top of the new, and still empty, native one.

There are a few steps involved beyond this.

First check to see if you indeed had a snap installation or only have /var/lib/plexmediaserver ?

3

Thank you so much for your answer.

snap list says:

plexmediaserver 1.26.2.5797-5bd057d2b 284 latest/stable plexinc✓ -

ll /var/lib/:
drwxr-xr-x 3 plex plex 4096 mai 28 17:04 plexmediaserver/

It seems that I have Plex in both places, although the SNAP version seems to be up to date. May 28 (date is in French) is the dat I upadated Plex using the plexmediaserver_1.26.2.5797-5bd057d2b_amd64.deb file downloaded from the Plex site.

“/var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server” contains 320 items for a total of 9.5MB and no Media

“/var/snap/plexmediaserver/common/Library/ApplicationSupport/Plex Media Server” contains 434281 items for a total of 14GB, including a Media subdir with 193934 items for a total of 2.1GB which doesn’t exist in the other location.

It looks like the update installed a new server AND updated the old one, and changed the configuration to automatically start the new one although the library had not been copied (or moved to it). This looks like a bug in the installation process.

After copying the SNAP library to the non SNAP installation, It works again. I now wonder whether I should/can remove the SNAP version?

In any case, thanks a lot for you help. It saved my day (much more than a day, as a matter of fact)!

4

Well, it works for showing the library, but Plex can access the files. Logs show a permission error. Permissions are:

drwxrwxrwx. 8 pysaumont 1001 4096 avril 22 2020 ./
drwxrwxrwx. 3 pysaumont 1001 33 mai 30 11:18 …/
drwxrwxrwx. 21 pysaumont 1001 4096 mai 7 2020 Books/
drwxrwxrwx. 103 pysaumont 1001 8192 déc. 27 2020 ‘Home Videos’/
drwxrwxrwx. 895 pysaumont 1001 36864 mai 30 11:13 Movies/
drwxrwxrwx. 253 pysaumont 1001 12288 avril 16 14:00 Music/
drwxrwxrwx 36 pysaumont pysaumont 12288 mai 4 2020 Pictures/
drwxrwxrwx. 386 pysaumont 1001 12288 mai 1 06:27 ‘TV Shows’/

Looking at the logs, I can see multiple errors such as:

May 31, 2022 10:32:14.586 [0x7fb752477b38] ERROR - Couldn’t check for the existence of file “/media/pysaumont/c71a07b4-1b19-4942-8fc6-0440c4a0ac8b/…/TV Shows/.grab”: boost::filesystem::status: Permission denied: “/media/pysaumont/c71a07b4-1b19-4942-8fc6-0440c4a0ac8b/…/TV Shows/.grab”

Looking at the directory, the file “/media/pysaumont/c71a07b4-1b19-4942-8fc6-0440c4a0ac8b/…/TV Shows/.grab” doesn’t exist, but I don’t understand why Plex couldn’t check for its existence.

If I try to scan the library, I get this:

May 31, 2022 10:40:03.221 [0x7f41f9233808] DEBUG - * Scanning /media/pysaumont/c71a07b4-1b19-4942-8fc6-0440c4a0ac8b/…/TV Shows
May 31, 2022 10:40:03.221 [0x7f41f9233808] ERROR - Couldn’t check for the existence of file “/media/pysaumont/c71a07b4-1b19-4942-8fc6-0440c4a0ac8b/…/TV Shows”: boost::filesystem::status: Permission denied: “/media/pysaumont/c71a07b4-1b19-4942-8fc6-0440c4a0ac8b/…/TV Shows”
May 31, 2022 10:40:03.221 [0x7f41f9233808] DEBUG - * Marking media not available in /media/pysaumont/c71a07b4-1b19-4942-8fc6-0440c4a0ac8b/…/TV Shows
May 31, 2022 10:40:03.239 [0x7f41f9233808] DEBUG - * Taking 6759 items out of the map (which has 6759 items) for being unavailable.
May 31, 2022 10:40:03.326 [0x7f41f9233808] DEBUG - * Taking 701 directories out of the map (which has 1009 dirs) for being unavailable.
May 31, 2022 10:40:03.326 [0x7f41f9233808] DEBUG - * Taking directory ‘’ (2498) out of map.
May 31, 2022 10:40:03.326 [0x7f41f9233808] DEBUG - * Taking directory ‘11.22.63’ (2499) out of map.
May 31, 2022 10:40:03.326 [0x7f41f9233808] DEBUG - * Taking parent directory ‘’ (2498) out of map.
May 31, 2022 10:40:03.326 [0x7f41f9233808] DEBUG - * Taking directory ‘13 Reasons Why/Season 1’ (2501) out of map.
May 31, 2022 10:40:03.327 [0x7f41f9233808] DEBUG - * Taking parent directory ‘13 Reasons Why’ (2500) out of map.
May 31, 2022 10:40:03.327 [0x7f41f9233808] DEBUG - * Taking parent directory ‘’ (2498) out of map.
May 31, 2022 10:40:03.327 [0x7f41f9233808] DEBUG - * Taking directory ‘24/Season 9’ (2503) out of map.
…

I thought perhaps Plex had trouble to access the disk (a raid 5 array), but I can still change images for individual files by loading jpeg images that are in the same locations as the corresponding videos, so…?

5

Linux is strict about permissions.

Gnome & Nautilus compound that.

Gnome’s automounter always takes exclusive control of /media for your username.
Once it asserts that exclusive ownership, user plex is blocked. There is no way to circumvent.

The general solution:

  1. mount your media files somewhere other than /media to avoid the confict.
  2. set permissions & ownership on those mount points such that your username owns everything but grants read permission for all the directories and files (755/644 style)

Regarding moving your actual server instance from snap → native package, that’s easy

Please let me know what you’d like to do and I’ll assist.

6

I didn’t choose the mount point. The computer is a QNAP NAS on which I have installed Ubuntu because the QNAP system was really crap. The media files are on a RAID 5 array that was installed that way by Ubuntu. By the way, it doesn’t mount automatically at startup. I usually access it through Nautilus immmédiately after startup, which causes it to mount. I don’t know how to make it mount in another way, and I am very afraid to mess with this if I try to change the configuration.

I tried to change the access rights and ownership of the media directories and files (making plex the owner and making myself a member of the plex group, with no success. I restarted the computer several times to check whether it would change something and at one time, the SNAP version of plex started after reboot instead of the new non-SNAP instance (both the most recent version).

It appears that the SNAP version runs as root and can access the media files. So I copied back the library to /var/snap, and the server is now functioning.

Regarding what to do now, I don’t know what is the best option. I have no guarantee that the “correct” version of Plex will start at the next reboot, although I know now how to stop and start both versions, so I could deal with that. But I have to consider that at some point, it stopped working three days ago. This could happen again!

If I keep the SNAP version, It would be preferable to remove the non-SNAP one, which I don’t know how to do. Plus, the problem might happen again during the next update of Plex (although I might be able to handle this with what I have learned!)

If I keep the non SNAP version, I must modify the mounting of the RAID 5 array. This scares me because I don’t know anything about that and I am afraid of losing my files (about 6TB of videos and music, most of them being personal stuff that I can’t recreate. (And by the way, the Ubuntu install on the QNAP NAS is probably not something very robust!)

So I don’t know what to do. What would be the best move?

7

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